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Comment by fjabre | Hacker News Reader

In short: Awesome new iPhone Apple.

AT&T, you still suck.

AT&T's suckage continues to amaze me.

I carry both an iPhone 3gs and a Blackberry around most of the time (I'm currently justin.tv's iPhone developer). I find the iPhone pretty much useless around San Francisco because of AT&T's abysmal network coverage - I tend to just not bother and use the Blackberry instead, even though it has a worse web browsing experience (at least it always works! I haven't found a place yet that doesn't have good Sprint coverage).

I have no problems with ATT. I started with Sprint in the DC area (they started there, and tried to corner Baltimore & DC when they first went mobile). They sucked bad. Moved to North Shore (Boston), still sucked. Switched to ATT and never looked back.

Having said that, we have three generations of iPhones in our family, and when we go to remote regions everybody has to use my Motorola. I think that if Apple switched to Verizon, everybody would realize it's the phone and not the network.

Having said that, every iPhone has gotten closer and I'm hoping the 4th is a ringer, 'cuz I'd like to get one.

I've always been impressed with RIM's phones, though; they have impressive transceivers (I say that anecdotally; I don't know any specs).

New iPhone has new quite ingenious antenna design - parts of the external steel frame are used as antenna, so there is a good change it will work better than the old iPhone.

According to the review, the opposite is the case. The demo at WWDC also indicated that the iPhone 4 was worse than the 3GS even for wifi.

How so?

I don't think the 3GS was on wifi. Where did you find out this was the case?

They were both on wifi. The problem on the 4 was likely caused by it supporting N, which is of course much better than 3GS's G but is more sensitive to the edge case of ~500 people in the same room as you running wireless base stations without bothering to set up channels properly.

I don't think a change to the antenna would affect how it behaves in the same room as its base station, anyway.

The iPhone is the only reason I've stuck with AT&T. Reception is bad at my home (in MD), I have few conversations that don't drop at least once during any given 10-15 minute call. Worse though, I take classes part time, and the phone shows full signal on campus but calls typically go straight to voicemail and the 3g connection is completely non-functional. Attempting to call out just gives me a network error 95% of the time.

I friend if mine lives under the hill and he solved this problem by installing phone signal booster. He mounted device to the ceiling of the living room and patched antenna to the roof. Since then he has quite good signal in his house. Ironically, neighbors' phones piggyback on it too.

AT&T's awful network is the reason I ended up switching to an HTC Evo 4G on Sprint. I knew the iPhone 4 was going to be great, but the fact that AT&T is awful in my city meant it wasn't an option. If I was the sort of person who used a BB for business and a separate phone for personal, the iPhone 4 on ATT would be tolerable, but that isn't me.

After years of ATT's awful network, my first few minutes on Sprint gave me nerd chills: the same nerd chills I got when I was 15 and surfed the internet with broadband for the first time.

I can't decide which is worse, AT&T's network, or HTC Evo 4G's battery life...

I think reviews overstate the battery life matter. Mine drops to 40-50% after a day of use from 8am to 10pm. I don't use any fancy app killers or anything like that, I just only turn on 4G and GPS when necessary, have my 3G radio set up to activate on-demand, and rely on Wi-Fi for my data needs (My apartment, favorite bar, and office all have Wi-Fi).

The first few days of ownership I was actually struggling to wear my battery down to <5% so I could do a full charge cycle.

Note: I have a "Rev B." Evo.

My biggest complaint is that 4G service indoors is awful (close to non-existent unless you live in a house made of paper), and outdoors it is very latent even with a strong signal ( 200+ms)

Well, I've never gotten through a whole day without draining mine completely, even with 4G/WiFi/GPS usually off.

I'm not sure which revision I have (got it at Google IO)

Can't say I've had any serious problems with AT&T. I can't even remember the last time I didn't have 3G coverage or good signal. I'm quite sure some people do have problems but considering AT&T is still adding subscribers at a brisk pace, and keeping their old subscribers, makes me think the issues are hugely overstated. All 70 million AT&T customers can't be having these types of problems.

Are we (USA) the last country stuck with a single carrier iPhone?

No, you aren't. There may be other examples, but at least in Germany the iPhone is exclusive to T-Mobile. The bad news about that is that T-Mobile charges outrageous prices compared to the other carriers. The good news is that their network works really, really well.

We expected something different from Mossberg?

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